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Monday, December 13, 2010

Mapping LUNs with NetApp FAS throws: “illegal LUN” error

Ran into an interesting error today with a NetApp FAS which I’m sure not a lot of people would but in case someone does, this post serves to show why.

Problem

You’ve created your aggregates, volumes and LUNs and now you would like to configure initiator groups for your ESXi servers so you can map iSCSi targets. However, as soon as you try to map the initiator group to the LUN, you receive the following error:

If you try to hit apply again, you’ll see the LUN number get repeated:

Solution

The solution here is actually quite simple: Do not use commas in your initiator group’s name. I’m not sure why the FilerView even allowed it so maybe the backend didn’t have anything to catch commas (it catches spaces). Also, if we were to logically think about it, the FilerView actually runs the console commands in the background which would explain why the comma characters threw off the procedures executing the commands.

Re-creating the initiator group with a name that does not have commas fixes the problem: